Toilet-to-tap: Drought forces Texas city to treat wastewater to drink

Originally published July 9, 2014 at 5:09 pm
Updated July 10, 2014 at 4:06 pm

City of Wichita Falls Utilities Operations Manager Daniel Nix, left, and Nolan Mulholland, a water plant operator, look over the massive pumps and plumbing system Monday, which can move up to 10 million gallons a day from the filtration plant to a ground storage tank at the Cypress Water Treatment Plant. The city’s Direct Potable Reuse plan will go online this week recycling treated wastewater through the community water system, saving approximately 5 million gallons per day that would have been drawn from the reservoirs.

FORT WORTH, Texas — As much of Texas deals with lingering drought, a second city in the Lone Star State has begun reusing treated wastewater in a state-approved recycling process to bolster drinking supplies.

The water is then sent by a 12-mile pipeline to the Cypress Water Treatment Plant for additional purification.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality approved Wichita Falls’ proposal for a toilet-to-tap reuse program for up to six months.

The West Texas town of Big Spring, whose spring dried up decades ago, implemented this year an indirect potable-reuse program — where effluent flows into another body of water before being treated. The water is then filtered through reverse osmosis.

The city of Brownwood, about 80 miles south of Abilene, has approval for a project similar to Wichita Falls’ to treat 1.5 million gallons of water daily, but it has not started.

Wichita Falls is operating under a Stage 5 drought catastrophe, in which outdoor watering is banned and conservation is urged. Demand for city water has dropped 45 percent, according to City Manager Darron Leiker.

Still, the city’s reservoirs are on a trajectory to run dry by August 2016, according to the Texas Water Development Board. The Wichita Falls area needs drinking water for about 150,000 people, and supplies from local reservoirs have plummeted from nearly 90 percent capacity before the drought began in late 2010 to about 20 percent capacity in late June.

“We can’t conserve our way out of this,” Leiker said.

The city’s cloud-seeding experiments to stimulate rain have been unsuccessful. It’s considering using a polymer product to coat the surface of its reservoirs to repress evaporation, though a recent field test proved disappointing.

The drought is the second-worst in Texas after the 1950s Dust Bowl, according to the state’s climatologist, John Nielsen-Gammon.